In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There's an amorphous faction in the Catholic Church that's often called "traditionalist" that often embraces themes like more comprehensive restoration of the Latin mass, as well as less common and more extreme beliefs like sedevacantism, the view that the Holy See has been vacant since the death of Pius XII. Even if many traditionalists aren't formal sedevacantists, there's a more widespread view that Pope Francis is a heretic. In most cases, although there doesn't seem to be a single, unifying traditionalist manifesto, the view seems to be that Vatican II represented a preemptive surrender to modernism, and a return to a single mass rite in Latin, including the Roman Canon, is the cure. (If anyone can refer me to something that might effectively summarize this set of beliefs, I'll be delighted to hear of it and pass it on.) My impression is that many traditionalists are too young to have lived throuh the 1960s, when the Second Council took place,...

Bishop of Madison, WI Donald Hying appears to be moderate-to-conservative based on his public record, which includes public denunciation of rioters who desecrated religious statues during the 2020 riots, as well as leading opposition to discriminatory COVID limits on church attendance by Madison civil authorities. The photo above is from a post at The Hermeneutic of Continuity congratulatiing Bp Hying on his appointment as Bishop of Madison and noting that "Fr Zuhlsdorf is upbeat and positive about this news." As was widely published , A popular traditionalist priest who performed live-streamed exorcisms falsely alleging widespread election fraud will no longer serve in ministry in the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin. A statement sent to the priests of the diocese on Jan. 14 said Fr. John Zuhlsdorf will relocate to "pursue other opportunities" and noted it was a mutual decision reached between Zuhlsdorf and Madison's Bishop Donald Hying. . . . ...

Yesterday, I looked at Fr Hunwicke's account of his formation as an Anglo-Papalist in this interview and concluded that he's effectively been the same sort of fringe Anglican for much of his life, and he's brought those views into his Catholic conversion without much insight and, it would seem, without much change. He especially seems to see the Catholic Church fron the high-church Anglican perspective, whereby a select group has "correct" opinions that are constantly threatened by the less correct and, in Anglicanism, is always defeated by them. Frederick Kinsman understood that this is a shell game that was always part of the Tudor design as Elizabeth worked it out. I think Hunwicke's difficulty is that he's always believed Anglicanism and Catholicism are functionally equivalent. Anglo-Papalists see themselves as "real" Catholics, when actual Catholic authorities would gently explain the options available for them to take actually to become ...

There are two former Anglican converts to Catholicism that I frequently rely on to keep my own Catholic bearings. Both of them explain important things that weren't brought up in my Episcopalian confirmation class. One is Fr Dwight Longenecker, a moderate-to-conservative former priest in the Church of England, now a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, SC. (He came in outside either Anglicanorum coetibus or the Pastoral Provision.) At a Lenten mission at our Catholic parish, he gave a quick overview of the kinds of Anglicans, and he made the point that he'd have to listen for a while to what any particular Anglican had to say before he could give a rough estimate of what party he belonged to. The second is Frederick Kinsman, who was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919 before resigning to convert to Catholicism. He wrote several highly underrecognized books critiquing Anglicanism. Significantly, he was an Oxford-educated member of the Anglo-Catholic...

I never gave Fr Hunwicke much thought. I knew he had a large following for his blog , although I only occasionally glanced at it, in part because active involvement with a real Roman Catholic parish and active study of scripture and Catholic thinkers meant I saw little need to visit. I did, thoiugh, have an impression that he had a certain Blimpish persona with "Rule Britannia" always playing faintly in the background. Then Pope Francis began to speak of "traditional" and "rigid" internet priests, by which I assumed he meant men like Frs Zuhlsdorf and Hunwicke. As a good Catholic, I wanted to get a better idea of what he meant, especially as Fr Z, as he became more controversial, lost the support of even the conservative bishop in whose diocese he lived. So I decided to look at Fr Hunwicke more closely as well, as just the other day I found him calling the Holy Father a heretic as he underwent surgery and insisting that even the OF Roman Canon had...

Just so we have our priorities straight, the UK photographer who published this image as part of a lighthearted series was forced to apologize . Masks are very, very serious. But even the New York Times has begun to take a different perspective -- and since it's of, by, and for the elites, its perspective is through the lens of social class, which for elitists is a very, very serious topic. From this past Saturday, Are Masks A New Signifier of Social Class? (This is normally behind a paywall, but the Times will let you sign on to read it for free.) On a recent Sunday night at Le Bilboquet, a see-and-be-seen restaurant in the Hamptons, well-heeled diners nibbled on $475 tins of Osetra caviar. A handsome man showed off his gold Audemars Piguet watch to his sparkly female companion. A party of 10 in polo shirts and striped rompers danced to a tropical house remix of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” They were all unmasked, while the waiters, bartenders and other ...

One thing that strikes me about the traditionalist movement is the essentially Protestant subtext of so much that comes out of it -- the ich kann nicht anders insistence on speaking out over some perceived, often liturgical, abuse in the Catholic Church. For an example, I had only to return to Fr Hunwicke's blog and today's post. Oddly, he quotes an Anglo-Catholic priest's bombastic remarks from 1921: Let us remind ourselves that the grand possession of Western Christendom, this great prayer, the Canon of the Mass, this noble Consecration prayer, for at least 1300 years, intact and immutable, formed the basis of the Western Rite. and comments on it, almost as bombastically, A hundred years later, most ordinary Latin Catholic churches have abandoned it. Those that use it in celebrations of the Ordinary Form use a version in which, at its most sacred heart, the text has been messed around with. And from Bergoglian Rome come rumours of new liturgy wars. Surely, this ...